HST 251 was by far one of the most thought provoking classes I have taken while at Michigan State. When I signed up for this class this past summer, I expected it to be just like any other high school history class I had taken before. However, this semester in this class took me through a thought plane I had never traversed before in terms of exploring history in a class. To say it was eye-opening to me would be a major understatement.
The one thing that struck me the most about this class that I had never come across before was the various ways that we approached sources. Beforehand, the only real way that I had found data and did research for various projects before would just be a simple google search, the textbook that was given to everyone at the start of the semester, and very occasionally a trip to my local library. Obviously using “bad” sources is discouraged in high school (such as Wikipedia, etc), but this class opened my eyes to just how many sources on a topic can be misleading and/or just completely unreliable, as well as how we can root such sources out. On the other hand, this semester in my first college history class also showed me that there are so many other ways to find primary sources on various subjects than I ever could have imagined. Part of this is due to the university having an expansive library that is obviously much wider in its variety of material than almost any high school or local library, and the fact that this class and its material is almost strictly online, so the vices of finding sources was much more accessible than before. But the ways we found sources in class is way different than anything I could have ever imagined, and it will most likely be the most beneficial thing I take from any class I took this semester. This eye-opening experience almost makes me regret ever writing something before my sophomore year in college.
Another aspect of this class that will surely stick with me for a while is the exploration of the endless perspectives on (in this case) slavery in Early America. On earlier research projects I’ve done in my life, the problem at hand that was written about was pretty simplistic and had two distinctive sides that embody two different types of people, therefore being relatively easy to tackle in an argumentative paper. However, this semester I realized that there is much more than two sides to some particular issues, and the aforementioned way of exploring so many different sources reinforced this idea. In this case the topic that was generally explored throughout the semester feeds into the idea that there will be many different sources on slavery (since it has such an expansive history and complexity) and in turn there will be many different perspectives to explore. The way that we dove into each perspective though, really strengthened the idea that there are just so many different perspectives on the problem that was slavery.
These two ideas I just discussed were by far the most glaring things that this class opened my eyes on in terms of expanding my way of learning history. However, I cannot discuss how important these were without delving into the different ways that we deconstructed the countless primary sources and perspectives that we found. The particular one that I enjoyed using the most was the program known as Voyant. Voyant objectively may not be the most effective program we used this semester, but because of the type of learner I am, for me it was by one of my favorite that we used. What made it so appealing to me was its accessibility and overall easiness to use. It’s as simple as copy and pasting a bunch of words into it and/or just uploading a text file, and what it does with what you give it, in my opinion, is very interesting. Voyant turns a simple text file into a dashboard of useful vices to analyze the themes of a text source, which in turn can give you many insights into the work at hand, such as its patterns, trends, and volume of each word in the given sample. It does this by providing you with colorful graphs and charts that help “paint the picture” of the text at hand. The work we did with it was by far my favorite all semester. Another program that I particularly enjoyed using was the Omeka Net. Omeka wasn’t so much used for its analyzing of particular sources, but more or less more helpful for its accessibility, and its ability to be able to find particular primary sources and having the ability to upload your own. The last program worth mentioning here was simply the Google N-gram finder. It’s a very basic program, you just give it random topics/words and it gives you insight on the popularity of the mentioned topics over an amount of time. I liked how simplistic it was, and it was another reason that I regret writing a paper before knowing what I learned in this class, as it was right under my nose for years and I never knew anything about it.
Thanks to this semester in HST 251, I will certainly be using what I found in this class to reinforce any research project/paper I come across in the future, utilizing the full potential that I know behold. With that being said, I chose to redo portfolio project #5. Our fifth project this year involves feeding a group of articles into Voyant in order to analyze the trends of the various readings without actually reading all of them. I chose in part to do 5 not only because it was my favorite to do this semester (as I mentioned before) but I feel like with the projects that we did after it I will be able to create a more in depth conclusion using the Voyant text analysis site.